PHPStorm now includes MariaDB as a schema type but does not include the driver files. It does offer to download the MariaDB driver for you, but if you want to use the native driver, install mariadb-jdbc from the AUR and edit the MariaDB entry in PHPStorm to use /usr/share/java/mariadb-jdbc/mariadb-java-client.jar as the driver file.

Manually create the driver entry (the old way):

PhpStorm comes with several preconfigured database drivers (although the drivers themselves must be download separately). This short tutorial will tell you how to setup MariaDB as one of your Drivers on PhpStorm running on Arch Linux.

Xfce has great multi-monitor support. Different panels on each monitor, it all works great. I’ve used it with multiple monitors on my desktop for 5+ years. Love it.

But you run into some annoyances with laptops. Half the time I’m using my laptop on its own, and half the time I’m using it with an external monitor. You plug the monitor in for the first time, then you create a new panel for it and drag it over. But then when you unplug the monitor, that second panel doesn’t go away. Instead, it moves over to the main laptop screen and the only way to hide it is to delete it. Then when you plug the external monitor in again, you need to recreate it, readd all the items and so on.

This is a simple and obvious fix, but it was annoying me for awhile before I looked into it.

The situation:
You have a Chrome window open in workspace that’s different to the one you’re currently in. You receive a desktop notification from WhatsApp, Hangouts, 8tracks, ect. When you click the notification, it brings that browser window into your current workspace. But I put that window in that workspace so it stayed out of the way. You’re messing up my flow Chromium!

Actually this default behavior is super easy to change in Xfce.

xfwm4-tweaks-settings

Switch to the Focus tab and change When a window raises itself from Bring window on current workspace to Switch to window’s workspace. Voila.

I like to play games and luckily there are a lot of games for Linux now; I have 51 games in Steam which run on Linux. But not all of these games do a good job when running at fullscreen (diustorted resolutions, hidden cursors, ect). So I like to run games in a borderless window and not all of these games offer that.

This is a simple fix. Open cssm, navigate to Effects > Window Decoration, and change the Decoration windows property to (any) & !(class=Awesomenauts.bin.x86). In this case, the game I want in a borderless window is Awesomenauts (really great game).

Problem solved! For me at least. Here’s a related bug report (https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+bug/1197811) that unfortunately I didn’t find until after I fixed this by using the age old technique of randomly changing settings. But hopefully this post appears in someone’s Google results and I save them from the months of pixel overlapping agony that I had to endure.

If you’re working on something and you need to reload your database a lot, you can put all the commands on one line (still with semicolons of course) and add -f to the first command to skip the delete check.

Very very basic stuff here, but I’m sure the 3min it took me to write this saved someone else more time than that.

Suppose you live in Europe where they separate numbers with commas instead of periods.

Written:
Six thousand eight hundred and forty three and two tenthsEnglish/American:
6,843.2European
6 843,2

Suppose you also have a European keyboard and use a European keyboard layout but the stupid comma in the numpad drives you mad.

Simple fix
Open (or create) ~/.Xmodmap
Add the line “keycode 91 = KP_Delete KP_Decimal” and save
Run the command “xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap”
Test that it worked
Open ~/.xinitrc
Add the line “xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap” and save to make the change permanent.

The body of the phoneme element can be left empty, but in this case I wrote “dog” just for fun.

Can’t we just make computers better at speaking English?

Sure, and it would be trivial to make a build jQuery plugin that converts ALT attributes to IPA ones. But what about regional dialects and made up words like Flickr or Imgur. What about ambiguous acronyms? Should the company AAA be pronounced “ay ay ay” or “Triple A”? Is it “My S-Q-L” or “My sequel”?

Sounds good, when’s it coming out?

Fair enough, maybe you sacrifice a goat we could get it in IE11. Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe never. The spec hasn’t been touched since 2004 but I hope people start taking it seriously.